Ten House Memorial Photos:

Reprinted from The Post Crescent, Appleton - Neenah - Menasha, Wisconsin Copyright 2002 by the
Appleton Post Crescent and Gannett News Service. Some last names have been deleted
from this reprint. Originally Posted Sep. 12, 2002

NEW YORK — For the firefighters of the Ten House, September
11, 2001 was the day a blue sky turned black and bodies rained
from the sky.

They were beginning a new shift, at 8:46 a.m., when
terrorists attacked the World Trade Towers, spiking them
with two hijacked commercial planes, each loaded with 20,000
gallons of jet fuel.

John M is a driver on Ladder 10 Company, which was
stationed with Engine 10 at 124 Liberty St., across the
street from the World Trade Center. They call it Ten House.
It is the only fire station inside Ground Zero.

“We all jumped up from the table,” John M said. “We ran to
the front of the apparatus. The sky was completely black. It
was just all debris raining down on the street, papers on
fire, pieces of computer, bodies just flying out, just
things coming at us …”

They were the first to respond. The two companies lost
five men that morning. When they found the burnt wreckage of
Ladder 10, weeks later, it was buried under 40 feet of
rubble.

This company would eventually receive the first of the
New York fire trucks and engines manufactured after the
attack by Seagrave Fire Apparatus in Clintonville. It was
the first of four completed in record time to begin meeting
an emergency order for 54 New York pumpers and ladders.

The grieving employees of this Wisconsin company poured
their hearts into this truck, emblazoned on both sides with
a bold, unfurled American flag and with images of
dust-encrusted New York firefighters raising the flag at
Ground Zero.

When it rolled out of Clintonville, people lined the
streets. Some cried.

“We were crying when it came here, too,” said a senior
New York firefighter, Lt. Andy Grif. “It’s a beautiful
truck.”

The firefighters of Ladder 10 Company said they are proud
and grateful to work on this rig. It means a great deal to
them, apart from the improvements included by Seagrave. But
for a long time, for months, they thought there would be no
company, no truck.

After the attack, Ten House — a small, two-story
building, blistered by the collapsing towers but still
standing — was commandeered by police as an emergency
command center. Firefighters came to believe the city would
close the fire station, disband its engine and ladder
companies, disperse their surviving members to other
stations.

“It was just one less company they had to fill,” said
Kevin Ekberg, a Ladder 10 firefighter.

The surviving members of Ladder 10 Company went 160 days
without a truck. They were put to work on the wreckage of
the collapsed World Trade Center buildings — New Yorkers
called it “the pile” — tagging body parts, day and night,
using GPS technology to map the crime scene. It was
grueling, dangerous, unending work in a hellish landscape.

Without a truck, without a house, they were no longer
allowed to be firefighters. Other firefighters gave their
time at Ground Zero, but they had stations.

“At least they had a tour in the fire house,” Ekberg
said. “We didn’t even have that. Every day it was back to
that pile. It was a little too much.”

The attack and the destruction of the twin 110-story
towers killed 2,819 people in the space of 103 minutes.
Among the dead are 343 firefighters and 70 New York and Port
Authority police officers.

Firefighters and police evacuated 25,000 people before
the collapses. They saved thousands of lives in those few
minutes, at a terrible cost. Their actions were so heroic,
so selfless, they inspired a wounded nation.

This is the story of Ladder 10 Company.

“This is a bad situation”

It was shift change when the north tower was hit between
the 94th and 98th floors by hijacked American Airlines
Flight 11. There were extra firefighters at hand. In the
station, John M said, it sounded no worse than a truck hitting
a manhole cover.

But firefighter Serge Pilupczuk ran back to the kitchen
table where the covering officer, Lt. Stephen Harrell, and
other firefighters were talking. He said a plane just hit
the trade center. The color had drained from his face.

“To see a fireman scared scares the shit out of you,”
John M said, “because we go into dangerous situations all the
time and don’t ever see any fear in anybody’s face.”

Outside was pandemonium, thousands of people running,
some burned, some bleeding. Out the rear door, the sky was
blue. Out the front, it was black. They pulled some of the
injured into the station. John M turned and yelled to the
newest Ladder 10 firefighter, Sean Tallon.

“Sean, you gotta be careful,” John M said. “This is a bad
situation.”

They boarded the rig. John M was the chauffeur, a job for
experienced firefighters with additional training. His
officer, Lt. Harrell, sat next to him. Four on-duty and
three off-duty firefighters climbed on.

John M drove only a few yards. Bodies on Liberty Street
blocked his path.

“I stop the rig, and I look at my officer and say, ‘It’s
a body,’ and he says, ‘You gotta go. They’re dead, you gotta
go.’ So we rolled over them, pulled down the street.”

Turning left on Liberty, they were blocked again by a
Lincoln Town Car, a taxi. The woman inside couldn’t get it
moving. The siren was on, lights flashing, firefighters
yelling from the rear of the truck. A police officer jumped
in the Lincoln but couldn’t engage the shifter.

“So I had to ram the car,” John M said. “I push the car, it
goes up on the sidewalk.”

They turned right onto West Street, nearing the entrance
to the north tower. A man — in shock, his clothes on fire —
crossed in front of them.

“He’s completely engulfed in flames, and he’s looking at
me because now he thinks I’m going to run him over,” John M
says.

John M skidded the truck sideways to stop the man from
running and got out as another man came charging off the
sidewalk and tackled the burning man, damping out the flames
with a jacket. They were 100 feet from the tower entrance.

As John M and off-duty firefighter Terry Rivera doused the
burn victim, wrapped him in a burn blanket and got him into
an ambulance, Lt. Harrell led his inside team, firefighters
Tallon and Jeffrey Olsen, into Tower One.

“What we didn’t know, and found out later, was that when
the plane hit, the jet fuel came down the center elevator
shaft, and it lit up in a big fireball in the lobby so that
people in the lobby were incinerated,” John M said. “This man
must have been close by and he was burned.”

Later, they would learn the burn victim survived.

“An all-out assault on New York City”

Lt. Harrell’s team was followed up the stairs by on-duty
firefighters Pilupczuk and Mike Cancel and by off-duty
firefighters John Moore and George Bachman, who did not have
air tanks. John M told Rivera, who had no equipment, to help
in the street outside.

A ladder truck’s crew of six is divided into a
three-member inside team, or forceful-entry team, and a
three-member outside team. The inside team is the officer,
the “irons man” and the “can.” The irons man carries a
Halligan — a combination chisel, spike and forked pry bar
named after the New York firefighter who invented it — and a
flathead ax. The “can” carries a tank of pressurized water
and a six-foot hook.

Their job is search and rescue, and to locate the fire.
With the tools they carry, or with torches or hydraulic
equipment from the truck, they can break into any building,
force any door, crack open any elevator.

The outside team includes the chauffeur, who on a
rear-mount aerial like Ladder 10, can operate the ladder,
extending it 100 feet from ground level in less than a
minute, using it to punch through windows if necessary. “OV”
(outside vent) is the firefighter responsible for venting
the building. “Roof” is the firefighter who goes up top,
sometimes alone, opening a vent above and looking around the
perimeter for people hanging out of windows. They can lower
other firefighters to rescue trapped occupants or rappel
down the face of a building themselves.

Skyscrapers are different, these firefighters said. Built
with generally fireproof materials, they are designed to
contain fires. Fire crews don’t vent them, so the OV and
Roof can join the forceful entry team inside. Firefighters
locate the fire (which can be tricky) and get off the
elevator two stories below, where hoses can be hooked to
stand pipes. The stand pipes are pressurized by the fire
engines, the pumpers, down on the street. The attack is made
from stairwells.

To maximize office space, the north tower of the World
Trade Center, like its twin, was built around a central
skeletal shaft of elevators and stairwells, firefighters
said. The commercial jet severed this shaft, the stairwells
and the standpipe. There was no escape, no hope for the
1,344 people above the 91st floor. Many shattered windows
for air, 1,200 feet above West Street. Many jumped, choosing
this death rather than incineration, crashing onto a veranda
above the pavement.

“Every body that hit sounded like an explosion,” John M
said.

Just inside the front entrance, John M found two victims of
the fireball. A man, already dead, was pushed against a
wall, his clothes gone, his eyeglasses blackened, his tongue
lying on the floor next to him. The other was a woman, with
no clothes, her hair burned off, her eyes sealed.

“The woman, she sat up. I’m yelling to her, ‘Don’t worry,
we’re going to help you,’” John M said. “She sat up and was
trying to talk, but her throat had closed up. She died right
there.”

They covered the bodies so people coming down the stairs
wouldn’t see them and panic. Harrell called John M on his
radio and told him to check the perimeter. John M went out
into the plaza between the buildings, looked up, made his
report — fire all around Tower One, all upper floors
burning.

Then he looked at the plaza. At this point, they still
didn’t know it was a commercial airplane. They figured
something smaller; maybe a pilot had a heart attack. But
then he saw suitcases, purses and wallets everywhere on the
ground and as he looked, he saw pieces of flesh, pieces of
scalp, arms, hands, all around him.

“Then I realized this
was a lot bigger than I thought,” John M said.

Back inside,
John M joined other firefighters who were evacuating the
building. They heard on their radios that a plane had hit 2
World Trade Center, the south tower. It had only been 17
minutes since the first plane struck. By now, more than 200
firefighters were on the scene, with more on the way.

Now
they knew it was a terrorist attack. Then they heard a plane
hit the Pentagon. They heard early, erroneous reports that a
plane crashing in Pennsylvania hit a shopping mall, that
another plane was shot down over the Hudson River.

“In my
head, I’m picturing that this is an all-out assault on New
York City,” John M said.

The elevators in Tower One were out
of service, some blown out of their shafts, the people
inside them killed. People were coming down the stairs by
the thousands.

Rather than put the building’s surviving
occupants out onto West Street — where debris was falling,
where bodies were striking the veranda — firefighters and
police directed them through the lobby and down escalators
into the subway. There they could walk for three or four
blocks and come up a safe distance away.

Many of the people
coming out of Tower One were burned, others badly cut, flesh
hanging from open wounds. The firefighters yelled at them to
walk slowly, not to run. The marble floor of the lobby was
soaked by the sprinkler system and covered with broken plate
glass, with blood.

“If they’d run, they’d slip and cut
themselves wide open,” John M said. “But they were listening
to everything we were saying. They were helping one another.
They were carrying one another. They were helping older
women, they were helping older men, they were helping
handicapped people. With all this …. going on, they were
helping one another.

“I was proud of them.”

He knew the last
person down, the wife of a firefighter. He told her that her
husband was alive. She went into the subway. The lobby was
being emptied. Harrell, Tallon and Olsen were still climbing
stairs. Pilipczuk, in his 50s, suffered chest pains on the
stairwell — a mild heart attack — and was ordered to stop.
He was evacuated by Cancel, who was later stopped from
re-entering.

John M entered another lobby area and found
people up on a veranda, milling around, some taking
pictures. He told them to leave the area, that they were in
danger.

He turned, walked through a doorway, and the south
tower of the World Trade Center collapsed behind him. The
110-story building came down in eight seconds, creating a
hurricane force blast of crushed masonry and hot black smoke
that blew through the lobby of Tower One like a wind from
hell.

The wall behind John M collapsed.

“I got picked up. I
got tossed around the room, and I was screaming, ‘God
please. Don’t let me die, God,’ and I heard beams crashing,
and then it stopped, and I was alive.”

Alive, but beginning
to panic. The smoke was so thick he couldn’t breathe. He
couldn’t see. He turned his air cylinder on, took a couple
hits of air, collected himself. He searched for a way out,
found a window. Before crawling through, he clicked on a
small flashlight clipped to his jacket, turned and yelled:
“If anyone can see my light, if anyone can hear my voice, I
got a window. This is a way out.”

Another fireman, Lt.
Girard Owens of Engine Company 5, came out of the darkness
with five people. Thrown against the ceiling in the north
tower basement, Owens had a broken rib and an injured hand.

“Myself, and Lt. Owens and these five people were the last
to exit that building before it collapsed,” John M said. “We
were the last ones to get away.”

Owens would later tell John M
that if he hadn’t called out, hadn’t shown them the window,
the six of them would have died.

Outside, they saw the upper
floors of Tower One collapsing.

“I thought I was going to
get killed in the street,” John M said. “I was not far enough
away. I was just running, trying to find water. I wanted to
jump in the water to get away from it. I got about a block,
and it just went in on itself and I realized I was going to
be all right.”

He searched for his company, found the
survivors sitting near the Hudson River.

“It was very quiet
after everything fell. It was like the nuclear winter with
the smoke and the dust everywhere.”

“I had to find my brother”

They knew that Harrell, Tallon and Olsen were not
with them. They had died in the collapse. Harrell, 44, was a
gifted musician who played in several bands. Olsen, 31, had
earlier been commended for saving a family from a fire in
Brooklyn. He was married, with three children. Tallon, 26,
was a Marine, still on reserve duty, a man known for his
gentle nature. He loved Irish music, played the button
accordion.

Later, they learned that two other firefighters
from their house were killed.

Lt. Gregg Atlas, 44, was the
officer on Engine 10, the only firefighter on that pumper to
die. He was racing up the stairs ahead of his nozzle team to
assess the fire. Survivors report seeing him above the 50th
floor, still climbing.

Paul Pansini, 34, was covering a
shift on Engine 26. Every firefighter on that engine died.
Pansini had three children.

Moore, without an air tank, was
forced to evacuate Tower One and survived. Bachman, also
without full equipment, got out just seconds before John M. He
dove under a car when Tower One collapsed and was partially
buried but not harmed.

John M called his family on a cell
phone, and found that his younger brother, a firefighter
with Engine 228 out of Brooklyn, had been dispatched to the
Trade Center an hour earlier.

“I turned around and went
right back to the place I just tried to get away from
because I had to find my brother. I was all emotionally
disturbed at that point.”

For five hours, he thought his
brother was dead. His name was on an early list of the
missing. He didn’t have the heart to inform his family.

John M
went back to work, putting out fires. There were fires
everywhere. Cars and ambulances were burning. After hours of
this, he stopped, overwhelmed by the heat, sat down,
splashed water on his face, looked up and saw his brother
walk by.

“I grabbed a hold of him. I said, ‘We gotta stay
together.’ I called my family and let them know. They were
all excited and thanking God that we made it.”

Ekberg and
Ladder 10 firefighter Eddie Thompson, the chauffeur relieved
by John M that morning, heard of the first plane striking and
drove together toward Manhattan. They had to walk across the
Brooklyn Bridge, which was covered with smoke on the island
side.

“It just seemed so helpless and hopeless,” Ekberg
said. “It was overwhelming. I didn’t think the fire house
would be standing.”

They found their off-duty captain, Paul
Mallery, and began searching for survivors. They climbed
down into the subway to get under the towers, the same
subways that had been an escape route, but they were now
crushed and impassable.

“Everything was on fire”

Firefighter Pete D’Ancona, another 10 chauffeur, was ahead of them. He
had been scheduled to work, but had to make a court
appearance as a witness to an assault. He’d asked Jeffery
Olsen from Engine 10 to cover for him. When he heard a plane
hit Tower One, he called the court, said he wasn’t coming
in, and turned his car around. The prosecutor said the judge
was ordering him to appear.

By the time he reached the island, the south
tower was down. Thousands of people were fleeing the
financial district.

“Everybody was gray, covered in soot,”
D’Ancona said. “You couldn’t tell what color or nationality
anyone was. They were all gray.”

He was on Washington
Street, which dead-ends into the Trade Center from the
north, when Tower One came down.

“It was like an avalanche
coming at me through a valley,” he said.

He crammed himself
face-first into a doorway.

“This stuff came through and it
was hot. It had a hissing noise to it, with a big gust of
wind. It was like wiping crushed glass on your skin. There
was nobody on the street. Everything was on fire, buildings,
cars, awnings.”

He found Ten House, its windows blown
through. It was as bad inside as out. His boots were
missing, so he put on someone else’s work boots and his
bunker pants. Joining other rescuers, he searched for
survivors. They found a firefighter trapped under a crushed
stairway, filling with water from broken water mains. A
thick, powerful man, D’Ancona found a broken piece of steel
and they used it to pry the firefighter free.

He began
searching for survivors, but there were no others. He worked
constantly. Dust was caked two inches thick under his
clothes. His feet were wet for three days. Their firehouse
became a temporary morgue.

“We tried to treat everyone that
we found like family,” he said. “It was personal.”

For dazed
firefighters, the next three days were a nightmare from
which there was no waking. Eyes and throats burned. They
worked the “bucket brigade,” clearing rubble in the search
for survivors. They carried out bodies in solemn
processions, officers calling, “Hats off,” to volunteers
working the pile.

After several days, city officials gained
control of the site. Soldiers secured the perimeter. Ten
House was turned into a command center for police, fire and
health officials. The Ten House firefighters were put at
their service, expected to more or less run errands. They
quickly rebelled.

“We’re not here to be slaves for the
police,” John M told them.

Commanders deemed it too traumatic
for firefighters from lower Manhattan to dig for bodies, so
the Ten House firefighters were trained to use GPS units.
Their job was to respond when body parts or personal effects
were found in the pile and to simply mark the exact
coordinates. It was a crime scene.

It didn’t work out that
way.

“It turned into going down there with the GPS, digging
out the body part, putting it in the bag, labeling it …
‘firefighter’s boot with foot’ … handing off the tag to one
of the chiefs, putting the bag in a cart and taking the cart
to the morgue,” John M said.

“That wasn’t too traumatic for
us,” he added, darkly.

They were meant to work 24 shifts
every third day, but they ended up working days on end,
grabbing a day off when they could.

“Every time everybody on
that pile found something, we were called to go and label
it,” John M said. We had it broken up into three teams of two
but it was just continuous. We were out all the time.”

Days
stretched into weeks. When they did lie down, sometimes the
building would shake, and the shell-shocked firefighters
would jump up and run.

“We never got away from it,” D’Ancona
said. “We never left. We were always there. There was no
escape from what happened, in our heads.”

After almost two
months of this, they could no longer take it. They
collectively went on sick leave. By then, the community had
rallied behind them. They demanded to be put back to work as
firefighters.

A month later, D’Ancona became ill and had to
undergo surgery to have glass particles removed from his
sinuses.

“Something they could stand behind”

The massive
death toll in New York sent a wave of shock, anger and
sorrow across the nation. In Clintonville, the grief was
savage. Seagrave workers here have been building fire trucks
for New York since 1963, and New York firefighters make
regular business calls in “Truck City,” stopping by Cindy
B’s tavern after work hours. Like proprietor Cindy Beery,
many of Seagrave’s 360 employees in Clintonville knew
firefighters who were killed.

The company reacted
immediately. Engineers, mechanics and parts specialists were
dispatched from Seagrave’s South Plainfield, N.J., facility,
where warranty repairs are made and where new FDNY trucks
are fitted with communications and markings. They were in
New York the day after the attacks. Seagrave manager Tom
Grein rented hotel rooms so they could work constantly
without having to return home. In one week, they helped FDNY
mechanics get 130 damaged trucks, engines and rescue
vehicles running.

Seagrave president Jim Green was in New
York the following Monday, meeting with Tom McDonald,
assistant commissioner of fleet services. The fire
department had lost 90 vehicles, including about 40 engines
and trucks. Replacing them was an emergency.

The fire
department in New York operates with 210 front-line fire
engines and 143 front-line ladder trucks. Another 30 spare
engines and 30 spare trucks are kept ready as temporarily
replacements. There are 22 reserve pumpers and 10 reserve
ladders, fully equipped but without crews, that are
strategically located around the city in the event of a
large-scale disaster.

Some of the reserves come from
different manufacturers, but every one of the 353 front-line
engines and trucks are manufactured by Seagrave. They are
unlike any other fire trucks, built to fit under low
ceilings and squeeze into the narrow buildings offered by
the city’s old buildings. Cabs don’t tilt to engine access.
Instead, there are removable panels. Recessed handles save
six inches of width on each side.

McDonald wanted Seagrave
trucks.

“The support network Seagrave puts in place is above
and beyond what we see from other manufacturers,” he said.

But now McDonald was under pressure to order from several
manufactures, to cut delivery time. He asked Green if
Seagrave could handle the whole order, 54 trucks and
engines, and if the company could start delivery in 120
days.

Normally, it takes 10 to 12 months for the first truck
of a new order to roll out the door.

Green said he’d get
back to him, flew home and held an all-employee meeting. He
told the workers New York was asking for the near
impossible. It’s a union shop at Seagrave, and there is no
mandatory overtime.

“The employees said (to) commit to
whatever you have to, we will make it happen. We will do
whatever it takes,” Green said.

Two days later, they were
awarded the $25 million emergency order.

“I think more than
anything else, there was an emotional commitment,” Green
said. “We came up quickly with seemingly impossible
production schedules, shared them with employees and our
vendors. I don’t think anyone at the start knew how it would
be done. We just knew we would do it.”

It meant rescheduled
vacations, working weekends and holidays. It meant massive
overtime. At the Plainfield facility, the six weeks it can
take to equip and mark a truck to FDNY specifications would
be cut to six days.

The employees of Seagrave would set new
production records. They beat the schedule, making fire
trucks faster than promised.

It wasn’t enough. Ralph
Edwards, a second-shift supervisor, said some of the workers
— like Jacob Gibbs, a welder who helped fabricate the cab
for Ladder 10 — approached him about putting a mural on the
first truck with their own money,

“We hoped it would build
their spirits up,” Gibbs said.

Edwards liked the idea, but
needed more. Another worker did the first sketch, then
machinist Justin Pflieger spent a weekend creating the final
design. Everyone in the company contributed. They used the
now famous image of firefighters raising a flag at Ground
Zero the day after the attack. The finished graphic was
produced by RJ Marx, a Grand Chute company that lays gold
leaf on emergency vehicles.

“We wanted something, some
picture, that would actually mean something,” Pflieger said.
“Something they (New York firefighters) could stand behind.”

“We wanted the firehouse back”

In the days after the attack,
many of the people in the neighborhood Ten House had always
protected — called Battery Park City — wanted to know what
happened to their fire companies. One of them was Rosalie
Joseph, whose apartment building was badly damaged when the
towers collapsed.

“The community was trying to get to the
firehouse, but couldn’t because it’s in Ground Zero,” she
said. “We couldn’t get anywhere near it.”

She found a
firefighter she knew and was told the survivors of Ladder 10
and Engine 10 companies were assigned full-time to the
recovery effort.

“Our guys were literally living on the
pile, working on the pile, in the middle of it, living there
for weeks,” Joseph said. “These guys I am talking about,
they were the first in. After I found out what was
happening, my friend Mary Reynolds and I decided we had to
do something.”

Then she was told the city planned to close
the house, disperse the companies. As this news spread
through Battery Park, the residents became deeply disturbed.
They were to lose their firehouse.

More compelling, however,
was the fate of their companies.

“They were dispersed,”
Joseph said. “They not only lost their brothers, they lost
their home, they lost their ability to be firemen and to
protect their neighborhood. They lost their family.
Literally, they had a tragedy.”

She found Capt. Mallery. He
wanted the company restored and agreed to work with her, as
did Capt. Gene Kelty of Engine 10 Company.

Joseph, director
of casting for ABC Television, organized a committee of
concerned neighbors, started a petition and then mounted an
all-out effort to restore the companies and save Ten House.
There were fund-raisers, including one directed by Tom
Fontana, creator of the Oz show on HBO. It featured
appearances by television stars from New York, including the
cast of Law & Order.

A freelance writer and friend of
Joseph, Benita Gold, began working on a story for the New
York Post. In late October, she called the office of the
Fire Commissioner, asking for a quote about the disbanding
of the companies.

“When they knew an article was happening,
they put Engine 10 back in service,” Joseph said. “It
happened the day before the article came out. They called
her and said they were bringing back Engine 10 and housing
them and their engine at the station on South Street.”

Engine 10 went into service on Saturday, Nov. 3. Because the
city was short on firefighters, both Ten House companies
were assigned to the engine.

“That night we caught a job in
our district, a fire in Battery Park City,” Kelty said.
“They gave a wrong address, but we knew it was the Gateway
Plaza. There was a fire on the sixth floor.”

They got to it
before it could spread. No one was injured.

“The problem
then became Ladder 10,” Joseph said. “They were still out of
service.”

Now Joseph and the others began collecting
political weight, starting with newly elected city
councilman Alan Gerson and eventually including state Sen.
Martin Connor and virtually all the elected local officials
in lower Manhattan. This went on for weeks.

“It was a very
long process, especially for the ladder company,” Joseph
said, “and the thing is, we still don’t have a fire house.”

In February, when enough support was lined up, Gerson called
the newspapers and scheduled a press conference. The night
before the conference, the Fire Department announced Ladder
10 Company would be reformed and put back in service.

The
official position of the fire department is that there never
was a plan to disband the companies or close Ten House. It
was simply a matter of not having enough firefighters or
equipment.

Engine 10 Company was then moved several blocks
north to Duane Street, with Engine 7 and Ladder 1, on the
north edge of Battery Park. Ladder 10 Company was assigned
to the South Street station where they squeezed in with
Engine 4 and Ladder 15, going back into service on February
19.

“In the beginning, we hated them,” joked Lt. Grif, an
officer on Engine 4. “Now we tolerate them. Now we enjoy
them.”

The Battery Park committee began a letter-writing
campaign to new Fire Commissioner Nicholas Scoppetta.

They
continued attending government meetings. One concern was
response time in Battery Park, now isolated by the road
closings around Ground Zero. Another was the restoration of
Ten House, the station that covered south Battery Park.

“We
wanted the fire house back in the neighborhood,” Joseph
said. “We wanted the companies back together. They needed to
be together and deserved to be. They needed some sense of
normalcy in their life, just as we residents needed some
sense of normalcy in ours.

“And we needed them to be there.
No one knows our neighborhood like the Ten House guys.”

“Someone was thinking about us”

Ladder 10 Company was given
one of the rehabbed ladder trucks the department keeps in
reserve. Most of the crew described it as usable.

“It was a
piece of junk,” D’Ancona said.

By February, the first four
trucks and engines manufactured by Seagrave had been
outfitted with communications equipment and markings to FDNY
specifications. Just prior to delivery they were placed on
display at a trade show at the Nassau Coliseum for East
Coast volunteer fire departments.

John M was there with a few
firefighters from Ladder 10. When he saw the Seagrave truck
with the striking graphics, he placed a folded-up Ten House
T-shirt in the windshield so the number 10 stood out.

Then
John M sort of started a rumor.

“Everyone came to me
and said, ‘Oh, that’s Ten’s truck’ and I said, ‘Maybe if we
get the ball rolling, they’ll actually give it to us even
though it’s not supposed to be for us.’”

In April, Mayor
Michael Bloomberg and Commissioner Scoppetta presented
Seagrave’s flagship truck to Ladder 10 Company. Engine 10
Company also received a new engine, one of the first four
FDNY vehicles to roll out of Clintonville, a high-pressure
pumper designed for high-rise work.

Scoppetta promised that
Ten House would be restored, and it has since been announced
that $1.45 million in federal money will be directed toward
the project. When it will happen is unclear. Perhaps next
spring. There are problems at the site, including a
neighboring high-rise that may have to come down.

The Ladder
10 firefighters are fond of their new truck, although
they’ve put a few dings in it already, given their
propensity for driving over curbs and forcing their way down
narrow streets. For a few days in August, it was missing the
front grill.

“A little punch in the nose,” John M said,
dismissing it.

To them, it is a tool. They appreciate the
new design, which for the first time has two firefighters in
back facing forward, allowing them to size up a fire as they
approach it. Also, it’s air-conditioned. In early August,
temperatures reached 104 degrees in Manhattan.

But after
everything the 10 Truck crew went through, it’s the truck’s
artwork that does what the workers meant it to do. It lifts
spirits.

“It felt good, like maybe they didn’t forget about
us after all,” said Ekberg, who repaired the grill himself
when a city repair crew took too long to arrive. “Someone
was thinking about us. Obviously, Seagrave was. Thank the
people of Wisconsin for me”

“It’s just too much sometimes”

Not all is rosy. Some veteran company members left during
those weeks on the pile, choosing other assignments. Of the
25 men on Ladder 10’s roster last year, just nine are left.
Some, like Capt. Mallery, retired. Others, unsure whether
the company would be restored, took advantage of open
transfer offers and chose stations closer to their homes.

“These were guys with 15, 18 years of fighting fires, and
now they were doing body recovery while everyone else was
fighting fires and they were not even telling us we’d get
our trucks back,” John M said.

Like many FDNY companies now,
Ladder 10 is young, with fewer experienced firefighters and
more new recruits than would have been normal before Sept.
11.

Some firefighters are having a hard time emotionally.
They’ve been to too many funerals, buried too many
“brothers.” Many are sick of reporters and television
cameras. They are besieged by tourists, whom they accept and
greet graciously.

“The support has been overwhelming,” said
Lt. Jerry Curran, now serving a tour of duty on Ladder 10.
“But it’s just too much sometimes. You can’t really act
yourself when you always have people around.”

As the
one-year anniversary approached, it was getting worse.

“Getting close to Sept. 11, the guys are going to be a
little more anxious and sleepless,” Curran said.

A year ago,
D’Ancona’s 10-year-old daughter spent a night at the station
before Sept. 11, and had dinner with the crew. Some of those
guys are dead, and she’s having a hard time with that, he
said.

Some firefighters are more irritable now, a classic
symptom of post-traumatic stress.

D’Ancona said they have
heard from firefighters’ wives, statements like, “He’s not
the same. He’s bad-tempered.”

Professionally, they face new
and greater challenges. Ladder 10 Company is being trained
to respond to chemical disasters, like poison gas in a
subway, and has been outfitted with fully encapsulated
suits.

An independent study of the fire department response
on Sept. 11, the McKinsey report, praised the bravery of
firefighters but highlighted serious problems with radio
communications and poor coordination between fire and police
commanders.

The point-to-point radios used by firefighters
have a limited range, and many firefighters above the 50th
floor of Tower One never heard the emergency order to
evacuate. A police helicopter, hovering above the burning
upper floors, was in a position to provide valuable
information to fire commanders, the McKinsey report states,
but the link was never made.

Curran said they are waiting
for the city to respond to these issues.

“We are truly a community now”

But the worst is over. There is healing. On
today’s anniversary of the attack, the residents of Battery
Park will hold a candlelight vigil. In two weeks, they will
throw a massive block party and the firefighters of Ten
House will be honored guests.

Firefighters like parties. That hasn’t changed.

“The great thing about it is we are
truly a community now,” said Joseph. “We have embraced our
firefighters and they have embraced us. After this
anniversary, I think there will be a lot of natural
healing.”

They know about the Clintonville High School
students, joined by the workers of Seagrave, who are running
a statewide campaign, “From Wisconsin to New York,” to
purchase a $450,000 fire engine for New York, an engine
Seagrave will make later this year.

“From one New Yorker,
thank you so much,” Joseph said. “New York would not have
gotten back if it weren’t for the kindness of strangers.”

“Thank you Seagrave workers”

The on-duty crew of Ladder 10
was being photographed, a newspaper portrait. D’Ancona held
things up for a few minutes, rummaged around the station. He
found a large piece of white paper. He wrote a message on
it. He wanted it in the picture.

“Thank you Seagrave workers
from the members of Ladder 10 — FDNY.”

Ed Culhane has been a reporter at The Post-Crescent since
1984 and an outdoor columnist since 1991. He covers the
environment, outdoors and general assignments and has spent
much of his newspaper career on the police and fire beats.

"The price of freedom is eternal vigilance." Thomas Jefferson

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